Hey! Glad you had fun, and you're right, it definitely is a game that you improve at after a few repetitions.
We've had an idea before where you could pay for mini-restocks of specific ingredient types. You might pay $5 to get a single random veggie, or a random staple, etc. This would push the game just a bit further into the "money management" side of things, since you're then sacrificing that money from being able to potentially purchase upgrades, and balancing that with how many stars you think you can afford to lose.
The staples are honestly only in there because it just wouldn't make much sense to have certain things substitutable across a whole category (in the later game, this includes rice, milk, and we were considering some others). We did end up giving them double the drop rate compared to other items, but it still certainly comes down to luck. After the jam is over, we're planning on putting out another update that will shift the balancing more towards 10+ day runs and might add that "grocery run" (buy a single item per category) system.